How can you use accessibility guidelines for e-commerce, social media, or multimedia web applications?

1 E-commerce accessibility

E-commerce web applications allow users to browse, buy, and sell products or services online, often involving complex interactions such as searching, filtering, adding to cart, checking out, and providing feedback. To make your e-commerce web applications accessible, you should adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the most widely accepted standards for web accessibility. These guidelines include providing clear and descriptive labels, headings, and instructions for all forms, buttons, and links; using consistent and intuitive navigation and layout; ensuring all content and functionality are available with keyboard only; providing alternative text for images, icons, and other non-text elements; using sufficient color contrast and not relying on color alone; providing captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions for audio and video content; allowing users to adjust font size, zoom level, and text spacing; and avoiding flashing, blinking, or moving content that could cause seizures or distract users.

2 Social media accessibility

Social media web applications allow users to create, share, and consume content and interact with other users online, often involving rich and dynamic content such as images, videos, audio, emojis, hashtags, and live streams. To make them accessible, you should follow the WCAG as well as the Social Media Accessibility Toolkit which provides tips and best practices for social media platforms. Some key aspects of social media accessibility include encouraging users to provide alternative text for images and videos they upload or share, providing accessible controls and feedback for liking, commenting, sharing, and following content and users, using semantic markup and ARIA attributes to indicate the structure and role of the content and the web application, providing keyboard shortcuts and focus indicators for navigating and interacting with the web application, using clear language that avoids jargon, slang or abbreviations that could confuse users, providing options to mute, pause or stop audio and video content that plays automatically or in the background, using live captions and transcripts for live streams and podcasts, and using hashtags and emojis sparingly with text equivalents or descriptions.

3 Multimedia accessibility

Multimedia web applications provide users with the ability to create, edit, and view various multimedia content, such as photos, videos, animations, games, and VR/AR experiences. These applications often contain features like filters, effects, transitions, gestures, and 3D graphics. To ensure your multimedia web application is accessible, you should follow the WCAG and ARIA specification. This specification defines attributes and roles to improve the accessibility of web applications that use dynamic and interactive content. When it comes to multimedia accessibility, you should consider providing alternative text, captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions for all essential multimedia content. Additionally, you should provide accessible controls and feedback for playing, pausing, stopping, skipping, and adjusting the volume and speed of multimedia content. It’s also important to provide options to turn off or reduce animations, transitions, effects, and sounds that could cause motion sickness or dizziness. Furthermore, users should be able to customize the appearance, size, position, and orientation of multimedia content and the web application. You should also provide options to switch between different modes of interaction (e.g., mouse/keyboard/touch/voice/gesture) as well as options to enable/disable VR/AR features with appropriate instructions and warnings for using them safely and comfortably. Lastly, make sure to use ARIA attributes and roles to indicate the state value and name of multimedia content and the web application.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?